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BETWEEN WOMEN: Love, Envy, and Competition in Women's Friendships by Luise & Susie Orbach Eichenbaum

BETWEEN WOMEN: Love, Envy, and Competition in Women's Friendships

By

Pub Date: Jan. 1st, 1987
ISBN: 0140089802
Publisher: Viking

The deeply-involved quality of friendships between women, say Eichenbaum and Orbach, traces back to the ""merged attachment"" and ""neediness"" of the mother-daughter relationship. In a world of serial love affairs and careers coupled with families, such friendships, say the authors, are often severely strained--frequently with significant emotional consequences. Because of women's traditional conditioning to be nurturing, self-sacrificing, and sharing, they have difficulty coping when a friendship falters or founders. Like an infant, some women feel abandoned and angry. Many find it difficult to deal with envy when a friend achieves something they want--a job promotion, a pregnancy, etc. Women have not yet developed the competitive skills required for the male-oriented workplace and sometimes try to sabotage a successful female co-worker or reject a friend who achieves greater success. What to do? What else, but to communicate frankly about these ""unacceptable"" emotions and attempt to achieve a workable understanding? Here, the problems and solutions are dramatized via case histories drawn from the authors' own experiences and (presumably) those of women who have attended their Women's Therapy Centres in London and New York. Yet another in the recent spate of books that delve into inconsequential niches in the female psyche--and characterize them as yawning, terrifying ravines.